Chicago cheesemonger is progressing the artisan cheese industry

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I meet Alisha Norris Jones at the Logan Square cheese shop Beautiful Rind on Milwaukee Avenue.

For local cheesemonger Jones, this stylish and approachable shop, which opened in 2020, is one of the best places in town to get cheese. “I love how diverse and friendly the staff is,” she says while eyeing the menu, which has a heavy focus on American-made products.

Jones appears in a new documentary called “Shelf Life,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year and screened in Chicago last month. The film explores the similarities between aging cheese and our aging human bodies. As executive producer Robyn Metcalfe told me, “We didn’t want to cover cheese in a way that would be expected.” Rather than profiling cheesemakers and their processes, the film uses cheese as a conduit for bigger questions, like: Is there a point in the lifecycle when humans are at their peak?

The film — which screened this summer at Maxwells Trading, where Jones is a server — introduces viewers to Jones, a Black woman operating in the mostly white world of cheese. She is among a wave of industry-changing cheesemongers who are demanding changes to make the industry more diverse and inclusive.

Jones, who uses the moniker “Immortal Milk” in her work as a freelance cheesemonger, agreed to meet me at Beautiful Rind to tell me how she got into this industry and where newbies should begin when putting together a cheese board.

The 38-year-old, who lives in nearby Humboldt Park, starts by ordering us a plate of five cheeses — after all, exercising restraint is a key building block of a good spread, in her expert opinion.

“Try to get a wide variety of styles, so: something that you know that you’re going to like, something that is going to be soft, something that maybe is flavored and then something that’s going to freak you out,” says Jones, who used to work at this shop.

A server brings our cheese to the table, presented on a wooden board and served with pairings like strawberry jam and rum raisin chutney and a side of bread.

On the left side of the board, we have what Jones calls the most approachable, creamiest cheese of the bunch. It’s Brillat-Savarin, a French triple cream made from cow’s milk. “It eats like a stick of butter,” she says. “This is something I would serve to someone that’s like, ‘I love cheese, but I don’t like anything too funky.’” The board also features a Midwest cheddar and Gouda, a potent Tennessee blue cheese and a pungent washed-rind offering.

As we taste, I ask Jones about how she approaches her work.

“Cheese is so cool because it’s a really great way to talk about so many things,” she tells me. “You can talk about gender, politics, history, religion, art, science, all of that. And at the same time, here’s this piece of cheese and isn’t it delicious?”

Jones grew up in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, which she says is a food desert. Her family had to drive to get groceries and didn’t have access to artisanal food stores.

“My favorite thing to eat when I was growing up was Kraft Singles. It was easily available and has kept so many families fed,” she says. “And I kind of hate the stigma against it.”

That was the start of her love for cheese, but her path toward being an industry expert began working at Chicago’s Publican Quality Meats. There, she tried the Pleasant Ridge Reserve from a maker in Wisconsin, which changed everything.

“It was like a ‘Ratatouille’ moment, where at the first bite of the cheese, I could feel like I was in Wisconsin,” she says. “I could feel the life inside that wheel. It felt like music, it felt like art. And it was just like, ‘Oh, this is very different from a Kraft Single.’”

We reach for a white cheddar on our board called Prairie Breeze, which comes from Milton Creamery in Iowa.

“It’s served relatively young,” Jones says. “It’s not overwhelming. It’s not taking on, like, big earthy notes, as cheddars tend to do as they get a little bit older.”

About six years ago, Jones started her cheesemonger journey in earnest when she took a job at Whole Foods, learning all she could about the products in the case. While there, she encountered firsthand how the industry can be prejudiced and exclusionary.

Jones says customers would sometimes insist on speaking with her white male colleagues instead of taking her recommendations. She also saw how some customers, often people of color, were intimidated to ask questions about cheese.

“I can’t stand for that,” she says. “I turned that fury, that anger, into ‘I am going to be as Black as possible in these spaces and make space for other folks to also do the same.’”

Eventually, Jones studied for and passed the Certified Cheese Professional exam, an SAT-like test, which is administered by the American Cheese Society and gives cheesemongers an added level of legitimacy.

Jones lifts a piece of Meadow Creek Grayson, a washed-rind cheese from Virginia, to her nose.

“I’m gonna use very scientific words for this,” she jokes. “On the nose, I’m getting foot, maybe a little diaper. But with cheeses like this, I feel like their bark is larger than their bite.”

She’s right. The pungent smell does not equate to a big, scary flavor here. Instead, that comes in the form of the Malört-pickled tomatoes, which she has ordered on the side.

Jones’ story is more widely known thanks to her appearance in “Shelf Life,” after first connecting with the filmmakers through a fellow cheese industry friend.

“She adds a lot to the film,” Metcalfe told me. “She looks at the art and beauty and tastes. She really thinks about how cheese interacts with other things. That’s a different perspective.”

In the movie, Jones explores the conversation around cheese and aging with her best friend’s father, who is in his 70s. Together with her friend and her friend’s newborn baby, Jones serves a cheese board in her apartment while the cameras roll.

“To talk about our aging bodies and to ask him what his sweet spot is, while his grandson was in the room, it was really, really cool,” she says. “I’m also tearing up right now.”

The local screening in July showed the film to a sold-out crowd. While there isn’t a streamer lined up yet, Metcalfe and her team hope “Shelf Life” will get distributed further.

At Beautiful Rind, we next sample a Golden Gouda from Marieke Gouda in Wisconsin. Jones tells me about this cheesemaker Marieke Penterman and her reverence for the process.

“It’s kind of a cliche to say this, but: Happy cows make good cheese,” she says. “And these cows are really, really happy.”

With the spoils of our platter running low, Jones tells me about her future goals as we sample the leaf-wrapped Sequatchie Cove Creamery Shakerag Blue from Tennessee. “Oh, it’s powerful,” I say, the taste lingering on my palate. “That’s why I gave you a smaller piece,” Jones says.

Despite shops like this with a wide selection and welcoming staff, Jones says Chicago hasn’t fully realized its potential as a top-tier cheese town.

“We have such a beautiful restaurant scene, and we’re all kind of waiting for cheese to catch up,” she says.

She plans to be part of that future — perhaps by one day opening a wine-and-cheese bar of her own.

Courtney Kueppers is an arts and culture reporter at WBEZ.